[21twelve]

Thanks for the story - Raytheon has been around for awhile!

I recall another story on how the Brits would use various ways of not letting the Germans know they had radar so early on in the war - and helped them win the Battle of Britian. I forget what they were though, but perhaps things like having a single “scout” plane that would just happen to cross paths with the incoming Germans, perhaps letting some through, etc.

[Lonesome in Massachussets]

Actually, in 1936 the Germans lead the world in radar technology. The British Chain Home system was so far below the Germans' expectations that they did not even recognize it as a radar set during an electronic surveillance of Great Britian prior to the War. The British employed radar more effectively than the Germans, doing a better job of integrating it into a coherent air defense network. Read Alfred Price's Book, "Instruments of Darkness" for an "illuminating" history of EW on the Continent during World War II.

The British breakthrough was the multicavity magnetron, an improvement on the single cavity magnetron developed by General Electric prior to the War. This was the device that Spencer improved the manufacturability of. The Germans had examples of the magnetron as early as 1942 and knew they were being used in airborne radar sets to hunt submarines. They countered by applying radar absorbing materials to the hulls of submarines, in other words, they invented stealth. By 1942, the Germans were up to their eyebrows in the war with Russia and did not have the time or resources to implement a program to utilize microwave radar. The German search radars operating at UHF, the Freya and Riese Freya, are still counted as the best search radars of the War. After the War, a Riese Freya was adapted as a radio telescope at the University of Manchester's Jorell Banks observatory, being the first serious radio telescope in the world.